{"id":10484,"date":"2013-02-22T22:45:26","date_gmt":"2013-02-23T03:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10484"},"modified":"2013-02-23T00:11:51","modified_gmt":"2013-02-23T05:11:51","slug":"eyers-hegel-lacan-is-non-dialectical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/02\/22\/eyers-hegel-lacan-is-non-dialectical\/","title":{"rendered":"eyers Hegel Lacan is non dialectical"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’<\/em> New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.<\/p>\n

It is worth registering at this early juncture the significance of Lacan\u2019s insistence on the inability of Hegelian logic to capture the paradoxical
\ncharacter of the psychoanalytic object. If it is commonplace to associate the development of Lacan\u2019s early ideas as discussed above with Hegel\u2019s account of the lord and bondsman in his Phenomenology, then such a reading is placed in question if, as I argue, the precisely non-dialectical<\/em> object finds its genesis in a concept (the ideal-ego) located and consolidated at this putatively \u2018Hegelian\u2019 stage of Lacan\u2019s thinking. 31-32<\/p>\n

Lacan himself makes this link explicit when he describes the \u2018i(a)\u2019 qua image of the other, in a discussion of the myth of Oedipus, as the \u2018complement\u2019 to the object-cause of desire: \u2018he [Oedipus] is thus the victim of a lure, through which what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the true petit a<\/em>, but its complement, the specular image: i(a)\u2019.<\/p>\n

If, for Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s Hegel, desire is ultimately a desire for recognition predicated on a negativity conspicuous in its contingent movements but statically fixed in form, Lacan here figures desire in an ambivalent relationship to an object that is simultaneously constituting and threatening, in the same way that the pre- Oedipal relationship with the mother is both mourned by the post- Oedipal subject and emerges in fantasy as something over-proximate and anxiety inducing.<\/p>\n

Lacan takes from Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s Hegel something of the contingent movement of what he calls, as the title of a famous article, the \u2018dialectic of desire\u2019, but not the immovability of the form of productive negativity, stopping up the movement of desire with objects whose obstinacy consists as much in their refusal to succumb to dialectical supersession as in the impossibility of the subject ever truly to \u2018possess\u2019 or know them, situated as they are in the opaque field of the Other 34 … Philosophically, we might distinguish between Koj\u00e8ve and Lacan\u2019s logic here in terms of a distinction between dialectic and paradox.<\/p>\n

While the dialectician seeks an overcoming that retrospectively reconstitutes what it has superseded at a higher level of becoming, the Imaginary (and later Real) object of paradox discussed by Lacan represents an impasse in such a movement, an impasse that can be generative as well as disruptive. 34<\/p>\n

to the extent that the <\/span>Real<\/span> permits of no absence, no division and no mediation, the ontological \u2018being\u2019 of the signifier, paradoxically,<\/span> escapes the metonymic logic of the <\/strong>Symbolic<\/span> 53<\/p>\n

The signifier qua letter, defined as it is through its persistence in the Real<\/span> , is constructed by Lacan as a material unit that underlies, and \u00a0undermines, the temporary epistemological sedimentation of meaning<\/span> via the \u2018Imaginary effects\u2019 of the signifier-in-relation<\/span>. 53<\/p>\n

The dispersed protosignifiers that shore up the movement of primary narcissism, minimally co-coordinating the process of ego-formation, seem to live on in the \u00a0signifier\u2019s post-Oedipal isolated dimension, a paradoxical point of nondialectical collusion between the Imaginary<\/strong> and the Real-in-the-Symbolic<\/span>… 53-54<\/p>\n

What might seem, then, to be the relatively simple positing of a material, formal substrate and its Imaginary effects, a kind of linguistic structure of form and content, is in fact the overcoming of the form\/content division, a theory of signification that posits a <\/span> Real<\/span> materiality only to insist on its<\/span> Imaginary genesis.<\/strong> 54<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. It is worth registering at this early juncture the significance of Lacan\u2019s insistence on the inability of Hegelian logic to capture the paradoxical character of the psychoanalytic object. If it is commonplace to associate the development of Lacan\u2019s early ideas as … Continue reading “eyers Hegel Lacan is non dialectical”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10484"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10496,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10484\/revisions\/10496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}